iPadpalooza Recap Part I

Been MIA for a couple days again. Was helping my sister, b-i-l, and nieces move five and a half hours away. *insertsadfacehere*

Today I went to Austin for Ipadpalooza (Eanes School District). It was super cool ... and that's saying a lot considering how early I had to get up to drive there this morning. *inserttiredfacehere* Of course you can never hit all of the sessions you want to but here is what I learned from what I DID get to see. I am not the best of notetakers so hopefully I credit the correct people with the ideas they actually shared! Note to Self: You had an iPad there with you, dufus. Screenshots. Evernote. Skitch. Dropbox. Learn how to use them properly and quickly enough to keep up!

photo credit: Yutaka Tsutano via photo pin cc

Keynote with Tony Vincent
So silly but ... BingoBaker. How fun is this? Must think of something to use it for. Bingo could be super overdone but used sparingly (and like he did ... where people just had to pay attention as he talked and mark off apps he mentioned).
More
Opportunities
Belong
In
Learning
Environments
Need to look up more from this page. Drat. I can't remember the one he used to dub his own lips in over a picture of President Obama. It was totally ridiculous but the kids would LOVE it and there could definitely be a use for it. It was sort of like Blabberize but instead of "cutting" the picture it superimposed just the lips of any video recording you put in. I remember he talked about screencasting and thinking that I really needed to "get on that." I just dislike the sound of my recorded voice. Intensely. Must Get Over That, too.


Tech Chick Tips and Storytelling Apps
Need to check again. First time ... the SockPuppets and Toontastic "All Access Passes" were not in the Volume Purchasing App Store. Or I used the wrong titles. I wish they would! (Got the PuppetPals one which is awesome ... just want the others, too). I mean, don't get me wrong. The freebie versions are great and have wonderful possibilities. I just HATE that I have this cool tool that is limited even a little bit by red tape and $20 or so more dollars. I wonder how much trouble I'd get into if I just bought a gift card myself and downloaded it the "normal" way. Donate the app to the school, as such.
iStopmotion. I don't know why I'm so interested in that one because I tried stopmotion last summer and it took A LONG LONG TIME. But in a strange way it was fun and I think the kids would like it. They discovered the Lego Super Heroes one on our iPad and totally wanted to do something but as it was like the last week of school ... no time. Would say "always next year" but those particular students were in 5th grade. Well. I told them the Lego one was free. This iStopmotion one is not (in fact I think it was like $10) but it had some great tools that would help facilitate the process. I used Smoovie for mine ... but that meant I had to import all the pics.
MyStory and Storypatch both look super cool. I even emailed our AP to ask about perhaps finding a closet we could turn into a minirecording studio for the school. The library is a hallway and there is always so much background noise on anything we record it spoils it ... anyway. I doubt there is space (or it's on the total other end of the school) but it never hurts to ask.
Already had ScribblePress. Love it!


Ibooks on Steroids (Monica Martinez)
We were halfway through the presentation before I realized that iBooks Author is a Mac app. And you have to have Lion to download it. Now ... do I download Lion? And I only have access to a Mac at home. Not at school. :[
That said, there are workarounds. Will be experimenting with EPub2Go and DotEPub as depending on how many of our iTouches (we have way more of those than iPads) can actually get iBooks ... could be a good way to get info to kids at a station w/o actually having to be right there. Make my own little multimedia book-lets. To start with, anyway. Then we'll see about the kiddos creating.
She did talk a lot about different iBooks. Not super interested in ones you have to buy and most of the freebie classics in the public domain are for older than elementary students. At this point, anyway. It's too hard with red tape to buy things and we don't have very many devices! One day. And we do have our Simple Touch Nooks. Finally. That's another post. :/

iPads in Libraries
This one was done by the librarian at the high school. Have I mentioned the SUPER AWESOME SPACE they had? All sorts of cool rooms for collaborative projects. Or quiet study. A "juice" bar where students could power up their devices with just the USB cord. She talked about piloting a program before their school went to 1:1 (How cool is that? Way to go librarians!). It was really more for secondary librarians. One day, maybe. I'd like to try, anyway. She did share a video clip about a Chicago elementary school library that I need to investigate further. Apparently there are other related clips somewhere.



I will save the rest for tomorrow (Nearpod and DoInk among others ... this means you!). This is already a long post!



PS I WILL NOT stay up to check out the #ReadingRainbowApp. I won't. But you can bet as soon as I get back from the dentist (DISLIKE) tomorrow morning I will. The one free book you get with the app (I hear), anyway. No $$$ left on the current Volume Purchasing Gift Card. If it will even be there. Please be there? And please be cool?

Test

Hmmm ... checking because my email is not functional. Please ignore. Will be back later with #iPadpalooza and some other things. :)


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

A Literary Quote for a Day Spent at Jury Selection

I did not bring enough books ... I brought two that I'd already started and finished both before 11. So then I downloaded a short story and a middle grade book from the iBookstore ... and my phone ran out of juice. Why did I not bring my Nook or the school iPad? Or more books?

There ALL DAY. Don't have to go back but seriously ... 9+ hours I'm not getting back. #civicdutyandallthat

I spilled a soda all over myself at lunch. And there were no good looking lawyers.
In my defense, the lids from the courthouse cafeteria soda fountain really did not fit well.

Make a Book Image Collage in PicMonkey

Or a shape collage. Or a landforms collage. Or a seasons collage. Or a animal groups collage. Or a habitat collage. Or any other classroom (or personal) reason you can think of. :]


First of all you need some pictures. If you are taking the pictures yourself ... great! Just follow your district guidelines in terms of student privacy. If you are using Creative Commons licensed photos (see the top part of this page for some ideas on where to find those) just open up a word doc to copy and paste the URLs for now. Depending on how you are going to use the photos you could either list the credits below the online collage, or maybe have them printed next to the poster of the collage you hang in the library window, or you could actually digitally stamp (is that another post? One note ... when you save pics? Click through and get the biggest version of it that you can. Don't right click and save on the thumbnail. Then you may end up with blurry collages.

So you have your pictures. In a perfect world they are all nicely saved together ... maybe in a folder called "Title of Book Collage" on your desktop. The number of pics? Totally depends on your layout and your purpose. If this a student project some sort of rubric reminding them to cite sources and demonstrate their understanding of the topic through images would be important. Don't just say "go make a collage" if it's kids doing it. If you are? You know what your purpose is. ;]

Go to PicMonkey.

Choose the collage version that you want. 

Upload your pictures from wherever you saved them. You can upload several pictures at once.

You will see them here.

Drag the pics over into the collage (one at a time) and arrange however and wherever you think they look best.

Ready to save?

You will hit save twice. The three options are just for file size and resolution. If you were going to print your collage really big you might want the larger file size (ie the one to the far right) but for normal printing and webpages the middle one has worked well for me.

Remember ... you click save twice! Make sure you remember where you save it!

The one pic on the left is a little blurry but it started out that way. These are just family pics so I don't have to cite anything. :]

Here's the one I made for The One and Only Ivan (Katherine Applegate ... and a GREAT GREAT GREAT BOOK). I hope to make some more this summer. This is easiest way I've seen for making photo collages (Big Huge Labs could do mosaics but they were not as easy ... they have lots of cool easy projects but the mosaic one was more complicated!) so I'm excited. YAY PicMonkey for releasing collage last week!

Just had a thought. Go back and add a nice frame to it. If you so desire. Save the collage as one image and then reupload to the basic part of PicMonkey. Oh, goodness. Did I just add another possible post idea?

And here are the credits for the Ivan collage. Again ... online you could just list them. Or print and put on the back of any hard copies you might use.


http://www.fotopedia.com/wiki/Gorilla#!/items/flickr-2289122022
http://www.fotopedia.com/wiki/Gorilla#!/items/flickr-3060565651
http://www.fotopedia.com/wiki/Gorilla#!/items/flickr-6045297846
http://www.fotopedia.com/wiki/Elephant#!/items/flickr-3614722178
http://www.fotopedia.com/wiki/Elephant#!/items/flickr-6128232102
http://mrg.bz/qb7rkg (circus image)
http://mrg.bz/xaIksv (crayon)

http://mrg.bz/fGvPiK (dog)

http://mrg.bz/PBdr7T (mop)

http://mrg.bz/Nl05u0 (mall)

http://mrg.bz/EIuafz (girl drawing)

If you decide to try it I would LOVE to see the links in comments!

Summer Goals

Oh, goodness. It's kind of a bandwagon now but oh well. You know how you need to make goals public to sort of help with accountability? Well. Here are my library/school/teaching/book/tech related goals. I won't mention the exercise and eating healthier. Or maybe I will. Another day.




Had an account for years, I think, but almost never log in. Must rectify this because I really think I might be missing out there.




THIS could be fun. Though I will have to decide quickly because if the stars align tomorrow is the last time I'll be on campus until August. Still have a couple other trainings but they will be in other places.




Something like this. Though I've been hemming and hawing about what places to put on it for months now. JUST DO IT ALREADY!

No fun pins about the second go round of all the files. First one got most of them out of the cabinet and into binders. But now the binders are kind of a mess plus I think I could still get rid of some stuff that I will never use. When I get all the covers made I will post (whether you care or not ;]).

That is doable for the library end, right?

A Request! Goodreads

So I was reteaching the "pics in ed" class at tech camp today and had a request for some help for teachers who wanted to use Goodreads.

I can do that! Plus it's nice to have suggestions for blog posts. Hopefully she will remember to come back and read this! And if anyone still has questions ... a blogger LOVES comments. ;]


Goodreads. I've been on it since 2008. I like it. I know Shelfari has a more visual approach ... but it's kind of like the difference between Facebook and Google Plus. You build up your familiarity and community in one and it's hard to make the move to the other.

I just went back and changed it to say Ms. O instead of my first name (Note to self: and maybe I should have thought that through because it changed the URL of my profile page--oops! Have I linked that to anywhere important?).

Sign up is pretty much like anything else. Free. You CAN link it to Facebook (and it's a nice way to find friends) but you don't have to. I do NOT have mine set to post to my FB timeline every time I add a book (either as read or as to read) but that is my preference. Don't mind if other people do unless it's clogging up my newsfeed every ten minutes with gross looking book covers.

Here we have the main homepage and toolbar. I cropped out the updates from my friends (which would normally have shown below).

And here we have my bookshelves. This is just like adding a label to the book. I'm not super consistent with remembering to label everything. Can't get too bogged down in small things. And yes. That "to read" is a ridiculously high number that I will never finish because every time I finish a book I add three more.

These are the books that I've recently finished. Well. Except for Pandemonium which I just finished. SO GOOD. Huge cliffhanger ending. Be prepared. :/ (And my apologies if that was a spoiler to anyone ... they don't bother me so I am always unsure of how far to go in any reviews I might write).

Speaking of reviews! That is one area I want to improve on. I have a book blog now. I didn't when I first started on Goodreads. I feel like book reviewing is ... well. I don't think I need to totally summarize the plot. That is for the book blurb from the publisher. I just write about my gut reactions and any ideas for use in the library classroom (if it was a book that I might use ... I do read other things!). So I guess readers sort of have to trust my judgement if they read my reviews. Maybe not the most helpful way to go about it but if it is going to take me as long to write the review as it did to read the book, well ... I'd rather be reading new books. Y'all don't need that much of my opinions! But I post the same thing in terms of book reviews to both places. In fact I embed my Goodreads reviews in my blog cause they make it look all nice and pretty with the book cover image. 

You can sort your books ... see the little carat right there next to the left of "cover"? Click on it and it will show you the first books you added to that list (in my case from 1-1055 instead of from 1055-1). Mine start back in 2008. I don't delete some of them cause I still want to read them. Eventually. Yes, I have gone back later and deleted books that no longer seemed as interesting.

I have shown the kids this page. I've also shown them THIS

even though right now I am behind. Summer will help me catch up!

I have my account set to send me daily book related quotes. I like them but you don't have to get them. Then they send me ... oh, about every 30 hours or so an update with all of the books that my Goodreads friends have added. You'd be amazed at how much fun that is for a book nerd ... I find out about cool titles and we can comment back and forth on our thoughts about respective books.

In terms of the classroom you could create a generic class account (for example, MsOsclass13, password) and write collaborative reviews for the books done as read alouds or in small groups. You can also search and read reviews maybe to help students decide what they wanted to read next? If your students are old enough to have their own email accounts you could help them set those up. I'd get parent permission and check with your district first about policies. I am of the mind that most of us are very responsible so please, meet the kids or parents whereever they might be. Connect on Goodreads if it will encourage reading! But I know some people abuse anything even slightly social media related in terms of the classroom and the rest of us pay for it. So please be smart. 

It's a personal choice. I really don't read anything that I would care if the students or even parents found out about (not a Fifty Shades of Whatever reader myself but that is just me). They'd see I like a lot of thrillers and not as many classics but I'm working on getting higher literature into the rotation. ;]

Font Party

So ... not really library or book or tech related. But I saw this on a blog and thought hey! Post idea! Which led me to other teaching blogs. Even though most of them are "regular' teacher blogs and not library blogs I still like following them. Makes me feel like I understand the elementary classroom better (since my regular classroom experience was high school Spanish).

I must admit ... most of the fonts I do not even remember where I got them from. Bad librarian paying attention to copyright and licenses! So you will have to google if you like the look of them. Most are free though I paid for a few. Silly thing is I forget to use the ones I paid for since you have to log in to Lettering Delights for a lot of them. Unless you want to insert (like clip art) each letter separately.

There are lots more but I don't want to be ridiculous or too repetitive with all of the others on the linky party.

Rabbit Hutch is best for headlines or titles ... too small and it's harder to read.
I don't know that I've ever actually used the Irish Spaghetti one. I just like it. Wouldn't work all that well for school, I guess, cause most of the kiddos couldn't read cursive.
Elizabeth. Nice and simple. Works large or small.
Same with Lounge Bait. And Typeset. That one makes me wish my brother could open up a bindery (cause he can bind super cool books ... and restore old ones) and I could help him with ... what did he call it. I can't remember. The machine you use to imprint the lettering on the bindings. Wouldn't want to have to set an entire book but could definitely do titles and names and such.
Mod Type needs to be short and sweet just cause too much print off kilter and it makes one a little seasick reading it. But perfect for the short and sweet!


Have a few more days of meetings and some tech development. And report writing (which I dislike immensely even though I know it is important). Sigh. And then jury duty. First time ever being called. Can you believe it? THEN maybe summer will actually be able to start.